1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and a system for producing an image from a vehicle and a vehicle comprising such a system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Omnidirectional images are being used in for example the real estate market, infrastructural planning, investigation of local traffic situations, etc. Organizations such as governments, municipal authorities, real estate agents, and insurance companies make use of omnidirectional images to investigate outdoor situations from behind their desks.
Conventional methods for generating omnidirectional images from a vehicle include specialized omnidirectional cameras; shooting several images in different directions from a single view point and stitching all the images together; or shooting several images simultaneously by means of a plurality of cameras.
An advantage of using a specialized omnidirectional camera is that images are taken in a single shot, the shot containing a seamless representation of the surroundings of the location where the image was taken. No further processing is necessarily required. A disadvantage is the high cost of the equipment and the considerable amount of distortion of the image.
Generating an omnidirectional image from several images that are taken in different directions from a single point of view by a conventional camera is advantageous in that the costs of the system are relatively low. A serious disadvantage of this method is that several images have to be taken, which takes up considerably more time compared to when a single image is taken by an omnidirectional camera, while in the meantime the vehicle is not moving, possibly blocking traffic. Furthermore, care must be taken that the camera system is pivoted around the entrance pupil of the camera to reduce or eliminate parallax errors. A further disadvantage is the post processing required to stitch the images together to generate the final omnidirectional image.
In the last example where a plurality of cameras are used on top of a single vehicle, an advantage is that images can be taken while moving, so that a relatively high amount of images can be taken in a single time unit since stopping of the vehicle is not required. Multiple images are taken in a single shot by the plurality of cameras. Blocking of traffic is not an issue either. A disadvantage is that parallax errors due to the plurality of entrance pupils cannot be avoided, resulting in stitching errors during the post processing.